NaNoWriMo: The Report

I failed. Of that, there can be no doubt. I can, however, report good news.

On 1 November, I and a bunch of other people undertook a unique challenge: write a 50,000-word novel in the thirty days of November (why not the 31 days or August, May, or July?) . I entered the task with two simple goals: finish my 50,000 novel and get myself into a writing habit, something I had fallen out of in recent months. The task, while daunting, broke down into 1,1667 words per days. Imminently doable.

The first thing I had to figure out was when I was going to write in order to instill the writing habit again. The second day of November was a Monday. With my CSI: Miami recap duties for BSCReview.com, I knew I would have no time that evening (watch “Castle”; watch “CSI: Miami”; write recap). Thus, the natural alternative: Lunchtime. I took my PowerBook with me, ensconched myself in Starbucks, and wrote for an hour that first Monday. Word count: 1,880. Hog dog! I was rolling.

And I kept rolloing. Every lunchhour, I wrote. It got to the point where I couldn’t wait for noon so I could again sneak into the world of my character. (BTW, I’m writing the first novel-lenth adventure of Calvin Carter, the hero of my story published by Beat to a Pulp earlier this year.)

Then, one day, I had to work through lunch. Was that a miserable lunch hour but I made up for it later that night.

Unfortunately, the day job kept creeping up on my time and, more and more, I worked through lunch. Sucks, yeah, I know. I missed a day. Another day, I didn’t make the 1,667 word count. If there is one thing you can’t do with NaNoWriMo, it’s get behind. You get behind one day, unless you have a great day in which you write 3,200 words, you’re screwed.

I got screwed. I missed a few more days and fell farther and farther behind. Have to admit that was discouraging. Onward I pressed and onward the day job pressed. Day job won. Battle lost.

But, the wider war was won (how's that for alliteration?). I have instilled in myself the Writing Habit. Even when I knew that I’d never make the 50,000 words by 30 November, I still took my Mac to work with me. It was a pain sometimes as I also carried my work laptop as well. The lunch hour is now a glorious oasis of creativity for me. I continue to bring my Mac to my day job. At lunch, I close the office door or steal away to Starbucks or Rao’s and write. Boy, it is delicious, the coffee as well as the writing.

In addition, I’ve transformed my writing room at home. I’ve separated the writing desk (for longhand notes and writing) with my Mac desk (computer writing). The neat thing about the Mac desk is that it is, in reality, an old server desk, with shelves on both sides of a central post. And it’s adjustable. As a result, I can raise the keyboard and monitor and stand to write. I’m coming around that that way of creativity. Let me tell you: it’s fantastic. More on that in another column.

Cliché alert: I’m a loser but I’m a winner. I failed in my ultimate goal of a 50,000-word story. I’m a winner in that my writing habit has returned. I’m also a winner in that I know I’ll complete the novel early next year. And I’ll write more. Were this a scale, the balance would be tipped in my favor.

I’ll take it.

How about other NaNoWriMo’s out there. Did y’all finish?

Passing The Torch

By Russel D McLean

In 2004, my first professionally published short story appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It’s a story that still makes me proud. One scene in particular, set in a nightclub (loosely based on the downstairs at the Student’s Union) still feels very real to me when I look back over it.

It was the beginning of what could be loosely termed a “series” of short stories centred around Private Investigator Sam Bryson. Sam was a man with his own morals that set him apart from the police force on which he had once served. He left in circumstances that were never fully explained and still had a contact on the force in the form of Sandy Griggs, a copper with a strange past whose own experience with domestic abuse as a child made him very hard on a particular type of criminal. Sam’s centre in life was his girlfriend, Ros, a philosophy lecturer at the university who hailed from the US. Ros covered two bases as a character – one, she maintained Bryson’s moral centre and, two, she explained why he had a more American idiom to the way he spoke than most other characters. This was my insurance since at the time I was reading so much US crime fic that the slang and speech patterns had started to bleed over into my own writing.

Somewhere around 2006 I got my first agent.

I said I wanted to write a novel with Sam at the centre.

They said: “Give us someone new. Not someone with all this backstory.”

If I’m honest, this response irritated me. I didn’t see why they wanted me to drop this character who many readers had received well. I liked him. I liked him a lot.

So what was my response?

You want a character who has to build his life, I’ll give you him.

So I stripped Sam of his name. And all his support network. Took away everything he had earned and looked at what was left.

He became McNee*. A man with no first name. So I took that away from him. I took away his support in the force, making him an outcast (by choice, you could say) and then I took away his support in the real world by killing off the love of his life.

What emerged came from the same basic archetype as Bryson but was darker, harder and I think more believable. His reasons for leaving the force suddenly became concrete. His antipathy towards his former colleagues was understandable given the new circumstances in which this archetype found himself.

And then my agent and I parted company.

I didn’t know what to do. But I had this character and this manuscript. And I liked them. If I was honest, I had grown to love McNee more than I had Bryson because McNee’s pain felt more honest and real to me than Bryson’s ever had.

But still the idea of Bryson lingered at the back of my mind. I was still writing short stories about him, and figured that I had to pass the torch somehow. I did this as indirectly as possible, with McNee having “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo in one of the last Bryson stories published, and a few hints about “the other guy” who used to work out of McNee’s offices in the first few chapters of THE GOOD SON.

I admit I’ve always wanted to explore more in-depth what happened to Bryson, what soured him on the PI gig, made him leave. I always had an end point in mind, after all. I always do. After all, regular readers of this blog will know how I feel about series.

And maybe one day I will tell that story. But until then, despite my initial misgivings I’m glad to have got to know McNee over the course of what is now two novels. In my mind, he is the more realistic of the pair, the more believable, and probably the more noir as well. There is something about him that is, I think, genuinely human.

But, of course, my American friends – many of whom will already know Sam Bryson, especially if they subscribe to the wondrous Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – now have the chance to judge the new boy as THE GOOD SON hits their shores this week. He’s already had Sam’s approval. I hope he’ll have yours.


*For the first draft, his name was McRae until I realised that fellow Scot and bearded God Stuart MacBride had already taken this name for his protagonist.

The Horror of it all

I love Stephen King.

During about a six month stretch in late '01, early '02, I read IT, MISERY, THE SHINING, THE DARK HALF, THE GREEN MILE, ON WRITING, BAG OF BONES and probably a few others. And all of them were great. Each had moments that really struck me, whether it's his comments on writing in MISERY and THE DARK HALF or his utmost creepy moments in IT and THE SHINING.

Very rarely am I freaked out reading a book. King has been able to do that to me several times.

In the last month, I tried to read THE STAND.

And I couldn't finish it.

And it made me think about what freaks me out in a book. And for the most part, it's the little things. Whether it's Pennywise in the sewer in IT or a father turned bad in THE SHINING, the small horrors scare me the most.

I think it's because the little things seem plausible. I can imagine someone snapping at a moments notice and trying to kill a family. I can actually imagine someone grabbing a person's leg through a sewer grate. Those details stick with me.

In fact, I was compelled by the first 300 pages of the THE STAND. I believed in the Captain Trips' superflu. But beyond that the book started to get too big for me. I couldn't find a way to ground myself in the book. There weren't many characters I could believe in.

If characters are scared of real things, if the characters believe in these things, so can I. But in THE STAND it was all beyond me. I'm not much into fantasy.

I want to feel the fear of the characters. I want to feel my own fear. When it's something completely made up, I lose interest.

So, what about you? What scares you in books?